Propaganda managed democracy: the UK and the lessons of Iraq

How does power shape ideas and ideologies today? Who controls the information on which public discussion rests? How is power used to exclude critical thought in politics, the media, universities, state policy-making? Has neo-liberal globalisation introduced a new era of state duplicity, corporate manipulation of truth and intellectual conformity? Are we entering a new age of unreason? The Socialist Register 2006 examines contemporary public debate and policy-making, scientific and social scientific research, statistics, the media, the business 'community', the World Bank, humanitarian 'aid', the role of the theatre. What standards of intellectual integrity exist today? After postmodernism, is it still possible for truth to prevail over half-truths and lies

Commercialisation of government communications:submission to the Government Communications Review Group, Stirling Media Research Institute

Much of the debate around government communications has focused on the use of special advisers, the lobby system and the centralisation of the system under Alastair Campbell. This is a legitimate focus and much has been said on this topic which is borne out by our own research.2 However the purpose of this submission is to raise a different set of issues which are less often discussed. These relate in particular to the organisation of the civil service and government communications and to the increased role of commercial agencies and commercial criteria in running and evaluating government communications. I wish to concentrate on six aspects. These do not fit very neatly under the headings of the review but are most relevant to the issues of context, politicisation and organisation

Our Responsibilities to Refugees

The paper explores the basis of the responsibilities we owe to refugees. That we have such responsibilities is a very widely shared intuition: the need of those fleeing from persecution seems to call out for a response on our part. But what exactly are our obligations to such people? Who are they owed to and why do we have them? The paper argues in favour of a human rights approach to refugee protection that includes the requirement of the implementation of a burden sharing scheme. DOI 10.17879/95189441435

Studies of the internal properties of jets and jet substructure with the ATLAS Detector

The internal structure of jets produced in pp collisions at the LHC is measured using the ATLAS detector in an inclusive jet sample corresponding to 35pb-1 of pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. Classical jet shape and energy flow measurements are complemented with measurements of new substructure observables with comparisons made to several leading order parton shower Monte Carlo programs. The jet invariant mass and \kt splitting scale are measured for anti-kt jets with a distance parameter of R=1.0 and Cambridge-Aachen jets with R=1.2. Furthermore, a splitting and filtering procedure is applied to the Cambridge-Aachen jets. These tools are then utilized for the first measurements of the filtered jet mass at the LHC in the inclusive jet sample as well the W+1 jet sample, in which a hadronic W mass peak is observed in the jet invariant mass spectrum. A sample of candidate boosted top quark events is also analyzed in detail for the jet substructure properties of hadronic "top-jets" in the final state.Comment: Proceedings of the EPS-HEP 2011 Conference, 21 - 27 July 2011, Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes, Franc